On Christian Zionism (1)
I have demonstrated—at least to my own satisfaction—that Senator Ted Cruz’s attempt to use the Bible in support of the unconditional U.S. patronage of IsraelS is completely without merit. But if I am right, how can I explain the fact that millions of Christians around the world find that same argument utterly convincing? The short answer is as follows: While the human being has been correctly described as “the rational animal” as well as “the social animal,” in the vast majority of cases the later aspect of our nature trumps the former. In other words, our need for community, belonging, and acceptance tends to override our need for rationally justified beliefs and intellectual coherence, even moral consistency. We believe as we do mainly because people around us hold those beliefs, and not because they are the conclusions of a critical inquiry. But this is only a generic explanation. A more specific answer would require a deeper dive into Protestant history and theology, starting with the nature of the Bible and the impact of the Protestant Reformation.
The Bible
The first point to note is that the Bible is not your best option for a relaxed reading on the beach while you’re enjoying some sunshine. The Bible is a Scripture, i.e., a sacred and authoritative text, and Scriptures are unlike all other books; they demand special skills and careful attention from the reader. Think of a Scripture like you think of the electrical wiring in your home—the wiring channels a powerful force that can help you do wonderful things but the same force can also give you the shock of your life, or even burn the whole building down, if you handle it the wrong way. Everyone knows that we must exercise great caution when trying to fix an electrical issue, and, whenever we are in doubt, to refer the matter to a qualified electrician. Unfortunately, what many of us don’t realize is that we need to exercise the same type of respect and humility when approaching a sacred text, whether it is Tanakh, the New Testament, or the Qur’an. The bigger the project, the more qualification we need to properly manage the mysterious force that flows through such texts.
The Bible is not a simple or straightforward narrative; rather, it is made up of several different genres, including stories, poetry, law, prophecy, parables, history, wisdom, letters, and accounts of personal religious experiences. These texts can generate a variety of different meanings, and a great deal depends on the interpreters, their approach, their purpose, and their reading skills. While a variety of rich and fertile traditions have developed over the centuries that seek to explicate the meanings of the biblical texts, distinguishing between good and bad interpretations remains a challenging task that requires at least some degree of formal training. Today, a conscientious student of the Bible would invest decades of diligent study in multiple disciplines—including ancient Hebrew and koine Greek, as well as history, archeology, anthropology, hermeneutics, literary theory, and comparative religion—before feeling confident enough to advance an innovative hypothesis or a ground-breaking interpretation.
The word “Bible” literally means the book, but this is a misnomer. A modern book is typically a unified text containing the thoughts of a single, identifiable individual. In contrast, the Bible is a collection of numerous ancient texts that were written, re-written, revised, modified, edited, organized, and rearranged over a thousand year period by countless authors and editors, virtually all of whom remain anonymous. The Bible is therefore best seen not as a book but as a bookshelf that represents a wide variety of approaches, commitments, interests, agendas, and viewpoints—all of which cannot be satisfactorily reconciled into a single, coherent worldview. This means that whenever a community relies on the Bible to construct its understanding of the world, it cannot avoid utilizing a variety of extra-biblical sources and influences as well, most of which remain below the level of conscious awareness. It is very easy, in other words, to project one’s own desires, preferences, and prejudices on to the biblical text, all the while believing that one is reading objectively.
Given the challenges involved in accurately capturing the various layers of biblical meaning and in differentiating good from bad interpretations, it is exceedingly common to misunderstand the text and to construct, on the basis of that misunderstanding, not just bad theology but also bad politics. Today, most Christians would agree that it was a monumental error, to put it mildly, on the part of their predecessors when they justified Native American genocide or African enslavement or European colonialism by appealing to the Bible. Yet, it is not as obvious to large numbers of evangelical Christians today that supporting IsraelS by appealing to certain biblical passages involves the same level of egregious misinterpretation and abuse of the Scripture as those past infractions. Currently, the Christian Zionist movement, particularly in its evangelical or fundamentalist manifestation, offers the most illuminating case study of how flawed interpretations of the Bible can help mobilize millions of people for a secular—and blatantly immoral—political cause.
The Reformation
The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century brought about a radical transformation within Western Christianity that impacted, among other things, how Christians approached the Bible. Prior to that transformation, the vast majority of Christians did not have access to physical copies of the entire Bible, let alone the education and training necessary for direct engagement with its text. This was part of the reason why most Christians had to rely on Church authorities to teach them what they were supposed to believe and how they were supposed to act. The situation began to change radically in the sixteenth century because of the synergetic effect of two major developments—the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on sola scriptura, and the invention of the printing press. As copies of the Bible translated into local languages became increasingly available, and as the pursuit of biblical study extended beyond the seminary and the monastery and into the lay population, the centuries-long monopoly of Church authorities began to breakdown. The Bible was now in the public domain, so to speak, and anyone with basic literacy could come up with alternative ways of interpreting the sacred text. This, along with the Protestant rejection of traditional religious authority—and its replacement by the “priesthood of all believers”—had a profoundly democratizing effect on the Christian tradition. The result was a cultural climate in which innovative interpretations of the biblical text could quickly gain followers, which, in turn, contributed to the progressive fragmentation of Protestantism into hundreds of denominations.
The emergence of Zionist beliefs among certain Christian sects was one of the consequences of the Protestant Reformation; it was also a major turning point in the history of Jewish-Christian relations. As is well known, Christianity arose as a Jewish sect in first-century Palestine and only gradually evolved into a distinct religious tradition and community. Because of Christianity’s Jewish roots, an independent Christian identity could only develop through a process of simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of the parent religion. Starting in the second century CE, Christians began to see the Church as having replaced IsraelC as God’s (chosen) people. According to this supersessionist view, also known as “Replacement Theology,” the Jewish people had lost their exalted position in God’s plan because of their failure to recognize Jesus as the promised messiah. This viewpoint encouraged a religiously-inspired Judeophobia, leading to centuries of discrimination, persecution, and expulsions of the Jewish people under Christian rule.
It was only in the wake of the Protestant Reformation that it became possible for Christians to move away from anti-Jewish attitudes. Two factors were particularly important: first, the rise of Covenant Theology with its emphasis on the continuity between IsraelC and the Church; second, a renewed focus on the Old Testament as well as greater emphasis on its literal (as opposed to allegorical) interpretations. Furthermore, Martin Luther’s application of apocalyptic themes from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation to the religious and geopolitical crises of his own times encouraged Protestant interest in biblical eschatology. In the seventeenth century, the influence of these and related factors allowed the emergence of restorationism among English Puritans—i.e., the belief that God’s plan for the end times includes the restoration of the Jewish Kingdom in Palestine. This doctrine then contributed to the belief that the Jews and Christians were destined to be end-time allies, and that they are pre-ordained by God to fight together against their common enemy—i.e., the Muslims.
Sadly, this last belief has persisted over the intervening centuries and is still fueling Islamophobia today. A large number of evangelical Christians are convinced that Muslim nations will form the armies of the Antichrist, a notion that robs them of their capacity to empathize with Muslim victims of American and Israeli wars. It explains, at least in part, why Christian Zionists are unmoved by the Palestinian genocide. For if Muslims are future supporters of the Antichrist, then Israeli atrocities against the Palestinian people are not just morally acceptable—they are eschatologically necessary.
It is critical to mention that the shift in Christian attitudes away from Judeophobia, as exemplified by the doctrine of restorationism, was motivated neither by a love for the Jews nor by the desire to atone for past crimes against European Jewry. Instead, early Christian Zionists were developing an eschatological vision in which the Jews were going to play an important but subservient role in a primarily Christian drama. The return of the Jews to Palestine was meant to be a prelude to their conversion to Christianity and the annihilation of those who would not convert. Furthermore, there was an expectation that Jewish migration to Palestine would be great for Christians in the short term as well, since it would allow Europe to get rid of its Jewish inhabitants once and for all.
Premillennial Dispensationalism
Fast forward to the nineteenth century, when the doctrine of restorationism was absorbed into a new interpretive framework called “dispensationalism.” The framework was developed by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882)—an Anglican clergyman and later a member of Plymouth Brethren. According to Darby, both the biblical narrative and human history are to be understood in terms of several epochs, or “dispensations,” which are distinguished by the specific manner in which God relates to people. Darby sought to replace Covenantal Theology with the idea that the divine promises made to IsraelC were not fulfilled in Christ, but were postponed until the end times. According to the Covenantalist view, God’s (chosen) people have always been a single but inclusive community. Arguing against this belief, Darby posited that IsraelC and the Church were two separate communities, and that God had a unique and distinct plan for each of them. To explain how these plans were supposed to unfold in the future, Darby identified several passage from various books of the Bible, plucked them out of their original contexts, and linked them together to construct a coherent narrative of the end times.
Darby made several visits to the United States to propagate his ideas, which were eagerly taken up by a number of his American acolytes. The latter made sure that the dispensationalist framework would become widely accepted as a popular and authentic form of Christian theology. Much of the credit for spreading Darby’s framework goes to the Moody Bible Institute (est. 1886) and the Dallas Theological Seminary (est. 1924). Missionaries trained by these institutions successfully exported dispensationalist ideas to many other parts of the world as well.
The fortunes of dispensationalism continued to rise in the twentieth century, beginning with the spectacular success of the Scofield Reference Bible (1909 & 1917). The annotation in this study Bible were composed by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843–1921), an American evangelical minister and a follower of Darby. The widespread use of the Scofield Bible helped popularize dispensationalism throughout the English-speaking world. The British conquest of Palestine in 1917, the establishment of IsraelS in 1948, and its territorial expansion in 1967 were all seen as vindications of the dispensationalist framework. For Darby’s followers, these events signified the beginning of the fulfillment of biblical prophecies about end times. Then, in the early 1970s, an alliance was forged in the United States between conservative evangelicals and the Republican Party, which significantly increased the influence of the Religious Right and, as a result, the popularity of dispensationalism. This was accompanied by a renewed interest in the imminent return of Jesus, given that Darby’s eschatological vision included premillennialism—i.e., the belief that the Second Coming of Christ will precede the promised thousand-year period of peace and prosperity.
From Prophecy to Political Action
We can imagine an alternative timeline in which dispensationalist views became very popular yet failed to generate any kind of Christian support for the Zionist cause. In other words, there was nothing inevitable about the relationship between John Nelson Darby and contemporary Christian Zionism. A writer can chose which words will appear on paper, but not necessarily the purpose that those words will eventually serve. Every human act has unintended consequences, including the act of releasing one’s ideas into the world. Even though Darby did not have much interest in politics, he still ended up playing a critical role in the genesis of Christian Zionism. This happened because Darby’s dispensationalist framework helped propagate the doctrine of Jewish restoration, an idea that carried the seed of Christian Zionism as it exists today. That seed might have remained dormant forever—except that historical conditions in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic were exceptionally conducive to its germination. These conditions favored the convergence of certain religious and political motives in a way that generated a desire, especially among the elite, for establishing a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. In hindsight, it seems like a small step from the belief that “the Jewish kingdom will be restored in Palestine before the return of Jesus” to the conclusion that “we must restore the Jewish kingdom in Palestine so that Jesus can return.” Closely related to the religious motive was the strategic dream that a Jewish Palestine would serve British and/or American imperial interests in the Middle East.
What all of this shows is that Christian Zionism was a reality in both Britain and the United States well before Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896. Two prominent Christian advocates for the Zionist cause in the nineteenth century (and beyond) were William E. Blackstone (1841–1935) and William H. Hechler (1845–1931). Blackstone was an American businessman and the author of Jesus is Coming (1898). He is best known for submitting a petition to President Harrison in 1891, asking that Palestine be given to the Jews. The petition, called the “Blackstone Memorial,” was signed by more than four hundred Christian leaders. On the other side of the Atlantic, Hechler was an Anglican priest and the author of the treatise “The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine according to the Prophecy” (1883). After reading Der Judenstaat in Vienna, where he was a chaplain at the British embassy, Hechler contacted Herzl and became his friend and mentor. What is noteworthy is that both Blackstone and Hechler were influenced by John Nelson Darby and both had started advocating for a Jewish homeland in Palestine many years before the rise of Zionism as a Jewish movement.
Today, an obsessive and zealous support for IsraelS is a central feature of the evangelical and conservative brand of Protestant Christianity. Figures like Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee have played key roles in providing religious legitimacy to Christian Zionism, along with cultural influencers like Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHay. At least four U.S. Presidents have actively cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the Religious Right—viz., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Out of these, Reagan and Bush Jr. were probably true believers, but Nixon and Trump are best viewed as cynical and self-serving opportunists with zero interest in biblical prophecies. But regardless of their motivation, political conservatives in the United States have been happy to receive the enthusiastic support—in the form of votes and donations—from Christian conservatives. For more than fifty years, both groups have been working hard to ensure that IsraelS continues to receive any financial, military, and diplomatic support that it needs or wants. In addition to the United States, similar developments have taken place in other countries that have sizable evangelical populations. As for IsraelS, its successive governments have eagerly endorsed, accepted, and even sought the support of Christian Zionists, while deliberately ignoring the anti-Jewish beliefs of their donors.
The Darby-Scofield version of dispensationalism has lost some of its theological appeal over the last couple of decades. Yet, its eschatology remains a formidable force in U.S. culture and politics. Among evangelical Christians, there are strong incentives that help maintain their allegiance to the dispensationalist framework. For pastors and televangelists, the financial benefits and proximity to centers of power can be irresistible. For members of their congregations, the value of community and meaning cannot be underestimated. In a deeply fragmented and alienating society where individualism reigns supreme, membership in a megachurch can provide a sense of transcendent purpose as well as much-needed relief from existential anxiety, not to mention the consolation of belonging to a large and powerful group. Faith in biblical prophecies can provide a spiritual anchor in an otherwise perplexing world where everything seems ephemeral, especially as one sees those prophecies coming true one after the other! In Zionist churches, everyone is encouraged to donate money to support the Zionist cause, regardless of their own financial situation. Ordinary Christians are taught that these donations are the means through which they bless “Israel,” and that they can expect God to bless them in return by giving them even more money—but only if their faith is strong enough. In evangelical circles, Zionism goes hand in hand with the Prosperity Gospel. Once collected, these donations may go directly to the Israeli government, or they may end up in the pockets of Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Waiting for Jesus
The eschatological vision of evangelical Christianity is self-justifying and self-reinforcing. It provides a unique way of reading the Bible in relation to recent and contemporary world events as well as of interpreting these same events through a biblical lens. The geopolitical landscape at any given moment is described in light of the dispensational understanding of the Bible, even as certain biblical passages are constantly reinterpreted so that they align with the latest geopolitical developments. The vague and metaphorical language of the Scripture provides ample opportunities for creative interpretations, keeping members of the congregation convinced that the end is near. By highlighting certain pre-selected themes and ignoring or downplaying the rest, evangelical advocates of dispensationalist eschatology are able to offer what they view as definitive proofs that we’re living in biblical end times. Dispensationalism to them is not a modern framework that has been imposed on the Bible from the outside; it is, rather, the clear and self-evident truth that was always present within the biblical text but that has only recently become accessible to humanity. World events, as seen through the dispensationalist lens, can provide all the evidence anyone needs in order to appreciate that human history, which has always been trotting along according to God’s plan, is now galloping toward its grand finale—including the Rapture, the Tribulation, the battle of Armageddon, the Second Coming of Christ, the Final Judgment, and the Millennium.
It is helpful to remember that the imminent end of the world is good news for true believers and born-again Christians, since Rapture precedes Tribulation in God’s timetable, as described by John Nelson Darby. If you are a good Christian, rest assured that Christ will physically take you and your fellow believers into the safety of heaven, away from all the pain and suffering that God will then unleash here on earth. One might even say that in evangelical circles, eschatology functions as the hope of a hopeless world.
To conclude this (very long) post, unconditional evangelical support for IsraelS is best understood in the context of biblical prophecies as interpreted by dispensationalist eschatology, prophecies that are believed to be coming true in our own time—such as the return of the Jewish people to their God-given homeland. True Christians must support IsraelS because of one simple reason—Jesus cannot return to earth, defeat the Antichrist, and initiate his thousand-year reign until all the Jews have gathered together in the Holy Land. Nothing can be more important at the current moment in history than creating the conditions necessary for the divine plan to unfold.
From the viewpoint of someone who sincerely holds these beliefs, what can possibly be the value of a few million Palestinian lives compared to the Second Coming of Christ himself?